KIRIBATI – The bones of Amelia Earhart have been found. Along with the bones of Gilligan and Ginger!

KIRIBATI – The bones of Amelia Earhart have been found. Along with the bones of Gilligan and Ginger!

Scientists at a DNA lab on Kiribati, a small island in the southwest Pacific Ocean, confirmed that bone fragments they found belong to American icon Amelia Earhart, missing and presumed dead for the past 73 years.

Even more startling was the discovery of the bone fragments of Gilligan…

and Ginger.

A group of Bone Hunters from Delaware, found the bone fragments on Kiribati, which straddles the equator between Hawaii and Australia.

Jack Maloney, director of the Society for Historic Bone Recovery, said that the island was on Earhart’s flight path as she attempted to become the first woman to fly around the world.

The bone fragments were found this past summer at what is believed to be an abandoned campsite on the island. The campsite, where a partial skeleton (which was later lost and never recovered) was found in 1940 by a British official overseeing the island, has yielded other clues that a Western woman may have spent time there.

Over the years, a woman’s shoe, a glass bottle with trace amounts of lanolin and oil and makeup products have been found on the scene. Other findings, including evidence of the cooking and eating of local sea life, were noted, as well.

“It looks like she landed successfully on the reef surrounding the island. It’s very flat and smooth,” Maloney said. “At low tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a parking lot.”

Anthropologists who worked on the expeditions that yielded the bone fragments, sent to the Molecular Anthropology Laboratory (MAL) in Bayonne, which has the capacity to extract DNA from both modern and ancient samples.

The director of the MAL, John Malley, said that the bones “were an exact match to the DNA to Amelia Earhart. We are 99.99% certain, it is her.”

Malley went on to say that the bones of Gilligan and Ginger were also 99.99% accurate. There were no signs of any bones from the Skipper, The Professor or Mary Ann.